OCEANSIDE — After two weeks spent bonding and learning special commands, 12 service dogs and their new handlers went home together after graduating from an Oceanside service animal training center.
The dogs and their new handlers were matched through Canine Companions, a nationwide nonprofit organization providing highly-trained service dogs to adults, children and veterans with disabilities and facility dogs to professionals working in healthcare, criminal justice and educational settings.
Canine Companions is divided into six regions, each complete with its own training center. The training site for the Southwest Region — covering Southern California, Southern Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Hawaii — is located at 124 Rancho Del Oro Drive in Oceanside.
The Southwest Region’s graduation was held on May 12 at North Coast Church in Vista.
The Oceanside campus is known as the Dean, Gerda and Trixie Koontz Campus after its benefactors, which includes bestselling author Dean Koontz, his wife and their late golden retriever who was originally adopted from the organization after retiring as a service animal.
Prior to graduation, service animals are raised by volunteers until they are almost 2 years old. In that time, the dogs are trained by Canine Companions’ professionals before they are matched with a handler.
Canine Companions holds four graduations each year for its matched service dogs and their handlers. At the Southwest’s most recent graduation, an additional 37 puppies moved up to the “college” stage where they will be trained before being matched.
“For the last year and a half, puppy raisers have socialized the puppies, taught them obedience skills, and arranged and paid for all of their care,” said Puppy Program Manager Becky Hein.
Once matches are made, the handlers go to their regional training centers where they work with their new service dogs for two weeks, learning all 45 of their commands. At the same time, the dogs adapt to their new handlers’ individual needs.
The 12 recipients traveled from all over the Southwest Region to Oceanside where they met and trained together with their new service dogs.
Lyena Strelkoff from Granada Hills in Los Angeles County was matched with Grant, a labrador and golden retriever mix. Canine Companions only trains either of those breeds and their mixes to be service dogs.
Grant came from one of 250 puppy raisers in the Southwest Region. Many other service dogs like him, including his fellow graduates, will go on to children and adults alike.
Grant is Strelkoff’s second service dog through Canine Companions. After suffering a spinal cord injury in a hiking accident, she began considering getting a service dog to help her out.
“I knew really nothing about getting a service dog,” she said.
Strelkoff chose Canine Companions because of how the organization maintains ties to its handlers even after graduation.
“If you need additional training support, if your dog gets sick and you don’t know what to do or you get conflicting information from vets, they’ll help you through it,” she said. “I knew I wanted to be part of that community.”
Strelkoff, who uses a wheelchair, particularly needed help with laundry. Grant’s training was extended his training to include picking up laundry piles and dumping them into a basket.
While Grant relies on a few different commands to do the laundry for now, including the “pick-up,” “retrieve” and “tug” commands, he will eventually rely on one “cleanup” command in which he will dump an entire pile of laundry into a basket and take it to the laundry room on the other side of Strelkoff’s home.
“Their commands are tailored to our very specific needs,” she said.
Grant will also help her by picking up things she drops and giving them back to her.
Strelkoff wants others to know how Canine Companions has changed her life for the better.
“The care they put into these dogs, the love, the impeccable training, their care and love for every recipient, their unbelievable skill at matching the right dog for you… they are an extraordinary organization,” she said. “These dogs have changed my life.”